Ontario’s new Stop the New Sex-Ed Agenda Party is running its first candidate in the provincial byelection in Ottawa-Vanier, exposing the rift between social and economic conservatives in Ontario’s right wing.

“A lot of parties agree on some of the major topics. Everyone agrees that hydro bills are too high. I don’t need to get into that,” says Elizabeth de Viel Castel. “My whole point in running is to send a message to the Wynne government and the (Progressive Conservatives) that there are a lot of parents who are very unhappy with the new curriculum and they’re very unhappy that they’re not being listened to.”

She’s a married mother of two who worked as an aide to assorted Conservative ministers. De Viel Castel’s father, Pierre Lemieux, was the MP for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell until a year ago and he’s now running for the federal Tory leadership as a social conservative, so she was raised in a political family. She used to have a Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario membership.

Her dissatisfaction with leader Patrick Brown’s support for Ontario’s health curriculum in elementary schools is profound. The new material replaced the curriculum schools had been using for more than 15 years, taking up issues such as peer pressure and bullying on social media, discrimination based on parents’ sexual orientations — and sex, in much more detail than its predecessor.

“I am a Roman Catholic, but I don’t think you need to be a person of faith to see objectively that it sexualizes children at too young an age,” de Viel Castel says. “It introduces oral sex and anal intercourse at age 12.”

Yes, it does that in the context of warning students that these are ways of catching sexually transmitted diseases, but it’s still introducing concepts to children before they’re ready, she says.

The Stop the New Sex-Ed Agenda Party is led by Queenie Yu, who ran as an independent in the recent Scarborough-Rouge River byelection and is running in the other one on now, for Tim Hudak’s old seat in Niagara West-Glanbrook.

Yu drew about 600 of the 25,000 votes cast in Scarborough, which is a pretty good showing for a single-issue candidate (she was listed on ballots as an independent) but not nearly enough to change the result: Progressive Conservative Raymond Cho won seat by 2,400 votes.

Although Brown voted with social conservatives when he was the federal MP for Barrie and courted them when he ran for the provincial Tory leadership, he’s moved left since then. He supports gay marriage and has urged his people to attend gay-pride events.

The Tories’ Ottawa-Vanier candidate, André Marin emphasizes the “progressive” part of “Progressive Conservative” as he campaigns on high electricity prices and Liberal corruption. His Friday schedule included a pub night with members of LGBTory.

The Scarborough campaign saw chaos on the sex-education issue, with Brown taking virtually all possible positions on it before finally declaring publicly, once and for all, that he was in favour of the new curriculum a couple of days before the Sept. 1 vote.

“I don’t want to say it was the breaking point, because there could be other things as well. I would say this would be the main one,” de Viel Castel says.

In Niagara, the electoral dynamics are weird: A 19-year-old social conservative named Sam Oosterhoff won the Tory nomination over a couple of veteran pols, stunning the party. Brown says Oosterhoff backs his social positions but they’re plainly not the ones Oosterhoff holds personally. The Campaign Life folks are supporting Oosterhoff in Niagara, not Yu.

Wherever social conservatives go there, that’s an unlikely seat for the Progressive Conservatives to lose. Ottawa-Vanier is a difficult one for them to win, a place that’s voted Liberal for decades.

Will de Viel Castel’s candidacy hurt conservatives generally, handing the seat back to the Liberals?

“I would leave that up to the citizens of Ottawa-Vanier,” she says. The Tories don’t speak for her and others like her on the issue they consider most important any more than the Liberals do. If she gets votes that otherwise would have gone to Marin, so be it.

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